Abstract

A couple of experiments were conducted to examine the effect of orthography and word recognition tasks on lateralization of language processing capability of two cerebral hemispheres. In Experiment I, sixteen right-handed college students performed lexical decision task of unilaterally presented single-syllabic Hangul and Chinese strings. For Hangul characters, the latency was significantly faster for the words that were presented on the right visual field (RVH-LH). This finding is in accord with a lot of previous studies showing that LH is more dominant in processing phonetic script. But for the Chinese characters, there was no cerebral asymmetry between fight vs. left hemisphere. Although this pattern doesn't seem to support the right hemisphere's dominance of ideographic symbols, a balanced performance by both hemispheres might indicate that the LH is no better than the RH in searching Chinese lexicon for proper response. In Experiment II, it was conjectured that while word recognition in a shallow orthograhpy is mediated primarily by a phonological, prelexical code, in a deep orthography it relies on orthographic cues and phonology is derived from the lexicon. Since naming requires no access to the lexicon and may be performed by assembling the pronunciation of the word, Chinese words which is considered to be a deep orthography might rely less on the LH than Hangul words, which is relatively a shallow orthography. Here, another set of subjects named a list of Hangul and Chinese words that was drawn from the first experiment. The asymmetry pattern was quite similar with the first experiment except the fact that the size of RVF-LH advantage in Hangul reading was bigger than in the first experiment. This supports the assumption that pronouncing Hangul word highlights the LH`s capability in phonological processing while naming Chinese character relies less on the LH. The possibility of further study of the effect of different scripts and various linguistic variables on hemispheric asymmetry in language processing was discussed.